by Jack Skeen
When his lie was discovered, he came home and got a job. He really didn't like working any more than he liked studying. He found a girl who liked to work and married her. But she soon tired of supporting him, and they divorced. He moved back home.
Eventually he moved to another town and got a job. His parents hoped he was finally making something of himself. He married again and had two little girls. Unable to sustain success, he lost his job and hid it from his wife. He pretended to go to work but instead hung out with friends. He couldn't sustain the deception for long, though. His wife took the girls and left him. He moved back home again.
The older brother was stuck in patterns of self‐destruction. His efforts to improve his life repeatedly collapsed in on him. His Circle never grew and was unbalanced.
The younger brother had a much different story. He worked in the summer and applied himself to the job, regardless of the task. He worked hard in sports and was often chosen to be captain of his team. He became good enough at baseball to earn a scholarship. Like his brother and many other college men, he liked to have a good time and party—but he generally did so in moderation so as not to put his future at risk. He met someone, fell in love, married and started their life together. They both got jobs and worked hard. His job wasn't much fun but he knew it was the first step toward a successful future, and he stuck with it.
He and his wife were devoted to their three girls. The younger son moved on to a job with more of a future. He became one of the most successful employees among his peers and was promoted to a position that required travel. Despite being gone from home much of the week, he coached his daughters' teams and attended their school events.
How did one brother get stuck while the other kept growing? What did the younger brother learn that his older brother missed?
Of course, this story is not only about these two brothers. It's about you and me and the people around us. Why does one person excel while another fails? Why does one life stagnate while another is vibrant? Why is one person bitter and resentful, while another is grateful and giving?
We frame these questions in the context of the Circle. Why does one person's Circle expand, while another's does not? The older brother in the story did not expand or balance his Circle. Meanwhile, the younger brother successfully expanded his Circle beyond self‐gratification. The balancing of his Circle created character growth, productive work, a partner and family, and a vision for a meaningful life.
Your Life Is Meant to Thrive
From birth, our lives comprise a series of developmental tasks. The successful completion of each task prepares us for the next. The first task was to start breathing. Then we learn to suck, cry, smile, hold our heads up, roll over, sit up, crawl, and walk. These tasks are elements of early childhood development. Health and child care providers as well as parents track a baby's progress toward these tasks as a sign of overall health. If a child consistently fails to meet developmental milestones, it's known as “failure to thrive.”
As you mature, the necessary developmental tasks become more subtle and quite profound, such as learning to trust people and to believe in your gifts and talents. Early childhood tasks give way to broader areas of development. Much like failure to thrive as a child, failure to thrive in young adulthood and beyond is similarly associated failure to learn a lesson or master a skill. Your development is arrested when you fail to gain awareness of and take ownership of your Circle. In early childhood developmental tasks are linear—you can't learn to sit up or crawl until you learn to hold up your head. This is true also of the Circle. As a young adult you must work to gain mastery and balance of the Circle's areas of development in a linear fashion, as we will highlight for you in subsequent chapters. The areas of development in the Circle are independence, power, humility, and purpose. Any effort to expand what is in your Circle beyond its current point is limited and/or doomed to failure until you become aware of the Circle Blueprint and work toward mastering and balancing its elements.
Adults who fail to thrive have the small and most unbalanced Circles. They don't value much. Their interests are self‐indulgent; their dreams, if they have any, limited to self‐protection or pleasure. Their impact on those around them is negative or nonexistent.
Adults who thrive, on the other hand, have learned to expand and balance their Circles by developing their character and cultivating their sense of purpose. Those who grow and balance their Circles develop personal habits that support a higher quality life. They are productive and make good choices. They find success comes to them and they are a positive force in the world. Before we explain the four areas of development, we first highlight some ways that our Circles grow.
Pleasure
Perhaps the smallest Circle is one that encompasses only momentary pleasure. If that is all that is in your Circle, you will indulge every whim and desire, even if those choices are ultimately detrimental to your own well‐being. When pleasure defines all that is important to you, it often leads to addiction, reckless indulgence, and crime. There is little or no capacity to create anything that requires discipline, productive labor, or delaying gratification. Such a small Circle results in a very dysfunctional and unhappy life.
It is only as you expand and balance your Circle that you escape the limitations you have imposed upon yourself. The first step is to include your own well‐being in your Circle and remove those aspects of pleasure that are detrimental.
Caring for Self and Your Well‐Being
It is fundamentally necessary to include your personal well‐being in your Circle if you want a meaningful and happy life. Caring for yourself sometimes requires you to do things that are neither fun nor easy, such as education and/or training for work. In order to succeed in your education, you learn to delay gratification through self‐discipline.
Self‐care and discipline are the foundation of all future success. They are necessary to a successful relationship, partnership, family life, and career.
Caring for Others: Family, Acquaintances, Friends, and Partners
Throughout life, you develop personal relationships with others—the earliest are usually with your family members. Some people you come to know are merely acquaintances, while with others the relationship develops to where you share a bond of friendship. These personal relationships expand your Circle. Committing to a life partner is a special relationship that creates a huge expansion of your Circle. Until you make the commitment to share your life with another person, your life is your own. Your choices only affect you, or at least, you only have responsibility for your personal well‐being. You can be as self‐focused as you please. But, when you add another human being to your Circle everything changes. That person's well‐being becomes important, and for your life partner, it can become as important as your own. Your time and possessions are now shared. Your decisions impact another person to whom you are responsible and deeply love. You simply cannot successfully have lasting meaningful relationships, particularly a thriving intimate partnership, if your Circle has not expanded beyond your self‐interest. And, in growing beyond self‐interest, you master the amazing skill of selflessness. Great relationships—whether with your family, friends, or partners—are built on the foundation of selflessness. And, selflessness expands your life immensely.
There are two ways to be in a relationship. The first way is to look out for yourself. For this to work, you only give to the extent the other person in the relationship gives to you, and you take to the extent the other person takes. You must always be looking out for yourself to ensure it feels fair—keeping score by adding and subtracting who has done what to determine the next action to take. The second way is to quit keeping score and give yourself completely to the relationship. You give no thought to what is fair to you and you quit worrying about what you have added and taken relative to the other—you quit playing tit‐for‐tat and just engage selflessly in caring well for your partner.
The first approach is likely to be fair but
comes at a cost: Not only do you spend valuable time and mental resources keeping score and worrying about who owes who and the debits and credits of the relationship accounting statements that could be spent elsewhere, but relationships built on this foundation fall apart as soon as fairness tips out of balance. The relationship is always fragile and prone to rupture.
The second approach frees you from this accounting burden, and the selflessness you give to the relationship is likely to be reciprocated, enriching your life in many ways.
Imagine taking the second approach to your relationship with the person you choose to share your life with. What if you determined your happiness by your ability to enrich your partner's happiness? It is a bold thing to love in this manner. You are fully trusting that your partner is similarly committed. But loving in such a selfless manner has tremendous benefits.
It is almost impossible to argue in such a relationship. Imagine that you and your partner are going to the movies. Your partner asks you what you want to see and you express your preference. You ask for your partner's preference and the choice is a movie other than yours. You respond that you now want to see the movie your partner selected because you truly want to make your partner happy. Your partner responds by wanting to see the movie you picked because your partner is so wildly in love with you and deeply seeks your happiness. Regardless of which movie you see, both of you are wildly happy. One person saw the movie of her choice. The other was able to bring happiness to his partner.
Moreover, loving someone in this manner changes you for the better. Prior to expanding your Circle you could be completely self‐centered and it really did not matter. But, there is no way to have a successful partnership without learning to share and to love. It is unbelievably expanding to learn how to make someone else's interests and needs as important as your own. It makes you a bigger person to learn to stop saying “mine” and start saying “ours.” Sharing and caring are skills that get you beyond the limitations of selfishness and self‐interest. They open your eyes and heart to the needs of others. They enrich your life with companionship and intimacy; things that are foreign to people only focused on themselves.
Parenting
If you are not a parent, it is likely that you have some understanding of the challenge and opportunity in raising children. If you are a parent, we are confident you know. Life before children is relatively easy. You decide what time you go to bed and when you get up. Your car is as clean and orderly as you like. Your home is quiet and neat unless you choose otherwise. You come and go as you please. Life after children is completely the opposite. You find yourself up in the middle of the night, bone wearily changing diapers and rocking this bundle of joy. Your car is crammed with car seats and strollers. You can't go anywhere without lugging tons of gear, and the quiet you want at home is now filled with crying, crying, and more crying. What did you do to your life?
You expanded your Circle. You took on the responsibility to care for and nurture a new life. What an awesome responsibility. You created a dream for your child whether or not you realized it. You want your child to have a good life. That might include finishing school, getting a good job, having his own family. Whatever your dream, it motivates you to do what is necessary to make it come true. You change diapers without complaint. You rock your precious child at night without resenting the loss of sleep. You play games that really do not interest you, help with homework that you do not really understand, and attend PTA meetings that are dreadfully boring. You do all you do because you care. Children are the incentive to grow beyond the selflessness of partnering. To be a good parent you must master the skill of self‐sacrifice. All good parents actually give up much of their lives for their children. They forgo their freedom. They accept the burden with joy. Self‐sacrifice is a game changer.
Work
Of course there are many ways to expand your Circle apart from personal relationships and parenting. There are many people who have not been in a committed relationship and/or do not have children who have very large and rich Circles. Work is another opportunity.
The smallest Circle you can draw around work is to see it only as a means to a paycheck. When this is how you view work, you are only motivated to do the very least necessary to get paid. You do not want to know what others are doing. You are not interested in learning any new skills. By having such a small Circle you have made yourself only minimally useful to your employer.
You expand your Circle when you take ownership of your job and make it very important to deliver an excellent product in a timely manner. With this expansion of your Circle you may stay late, put in time at home, or do whatever is necessary to live up to your internal expectation of success. Your boss can count on you to deliver and so finds you more valuable than your peers who are only doing what is necessary to be paid.
You can expand your Circle still more by taking ownership of the success of the company. While in the restroom of a company we noticed the CEO was picking up scraps of paper towels that had fallen from the dispenser. Many employees had been in that restroom that day and had passed right by those scraps. They did not see it as their job to pick them up. We were impressed that everything about his company was in the CEO's Circle, even scraps of paper towels in the men's room. Every employee can have such a big Circle. When you do, you look for opportunities to collaborate with peers. You want to understand how you can better align to create success for everyone. You pick up scraps of paper towels.
There are many ways to expand your Circle. Well‐being, personal relationships, parenting, and work are examples, and are not intended to be an exhaustive list.
The amazing truth is that all of the people we consider to be great are, in fact, ordinary people who drew a big Circle for their lives. Gandhi was a lousy lawyer but when he drew his Circle to include the Indian people, he became a man the world pursued for his power, wisdom, and compassion. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an inner city preacher who, because he drew his Circle around the treatment of African Americans in the United States, became an unstoppable agent of change. You might consider yourself be an ordinary person, but there is no limit to who you can choose to become. It depends only on the Circle you choose to draw.
So, if greatness is available to everyone, why don't more people become great? Why aren't you living as large as your heroes? The easy answer is that your Circle is still rather small. The more complete answer is that you haven't yet wrestled with and mastered the key elements that create a larger Circle. Aristotle said that courage is the one virtue that unlocks all others. We contend and provide evidence that mastering the elements of the Circle unlocks the pathway to mature character. That is why you need to understand your Circle Blueprint.
Truly great people are people of great character. There are countless examples of people who appear to be great but lack character. Quite often, their absence of mature character eventually comes to light and exposes their absence of true greatness. Character is the foundation upon which the building of a truly great life must rest. Character isn't something you can buy or steal. Character comes from mastering core issues that build a powerful and amazing life. Character comes from putting the right things in your Circle and becoming the person you need to be to fulfill those dreams. Character takes time to mature. And, not only do those core issues need to be mastered, they need to be balanced and kept in balance. It is only those who do so who arise to the level of greatness.
Chapter 3
Four Critical Developmental Tasks
It is one thing to become clear about what is and is not important to you. This in itself is a big step toward thriving that few people take the time to do. It is another thing altogether to grow your life into one that is purposeful, powerful, and strong. Growing your Circle requires development similar to the development you took on as a child. In order to thrive in your life, you must work toward accomplishing four critical developmental tasks: gain independence, embrace your unique power, embody humility, and pursue pur
pose.
There was a time when you were helpless. You could do nothing to care for yourself but cry when you were uncomfortable. You were completely dependent on your caretakers to feed you, clean you, clothe you, and love you. Even turning over was a chore beyond your ability. The best you could hope for was to find your thumb. But, you developed. One day, you learned to smile and smiling gained you the attention of others. You learned to talk and could then ask for what you wanted. This was much more efficient than crying and hoping others could decode your distress. You learned to walk and so could go and get what you wanted without having to wait for others to show up. You learned to use the potty and so could be around other children for longer periods of time. All of these developmental steps were critical to your physical independence. Without having successfully navigated them, your functioning would be severely limited.
Unfortunately, hardly any attention has been paid to the developmental steps needed to create a mature inner life. Without such guidance, many adults remain adolescents or infants at their core. They have mature bodies but immature lives. There are so many manifestations of arrested inner development:
Adults who make their lives all about themselves. They need to be the focus of attention in almost every conversation.
Adults who will do whatever is necessary to attain their goals even to the point of violating the rights of others and breaking the law.
